EU wordsmith lifts lid on eurojargon

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Poor translations of EU jargon can alienate ordinary people, with EU translators' increasing reliance on the internet raising the risk of mistakes, European Commission terminologist Alex Andersen told EUobserver.

The commission currently employs 20 terminologists, one for each official language, to advise translators how to handle industrial terms such as "biomass" as well as EU jargon such as "subsidiarity".

Over-literal translations can fall foul of connotations in the target language, creating unwelcome effects Mr Andersen explained.

Translating "European Union" directly into Danish instead of opting for "europæisk sammenslutning [European Association]" also hits the wrong note and can have far-reaching implications such as galvanising support for Danish opt-outs on EU policy.

"The word 'union' doesn't appeal to Danish people. It has negative connotations because people think back to the historic union between the Nordic countries when they in turn dominated each other," the expert stated.

Mr Andersen, from Denmark, has over 30 years' experience in EU terminology and speaks Danish, Swedish, Dutch, German, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and - the hardest to learn - Finnish.

But a question mark hangs over the future of the terminologists’ role in the European Commission and other EU institutions, with some Brussels directors wondering if they still need them in an age when internet search engine Google supposedly has a solution to any terminology problem.

Google no substitute

"With Google you often end up just confirming your own good or bad idea," Mr Andersen said. "And it does not help the harmonisation of EU terms among the different institutions."

When the commission reopened its Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels in 2004 it attached the sign "Commission Européenne" which should have read "Commission européenne" in correct French.

The faux pas was quickly corrected but you can still see the screw marks from the old E if you look carefully.

"If they had called us, it wouldn't have happened," the terminologist quipped.

The EU should also beware of coining terms with fuzzy meanings that few people can understand unless they make a study of the European project, he said.

"Just think of the French 'partenaires sociaux' which is often mistranslated into English as 'social partners' instead of the more correct 'both sides of industry.' The UK civil service uses the former expression to mean husbands and wives."

To help translators check for definition, an interinstitutional termbank (IATE) has been set up, - an electronic multilingual glossary set to be open to the public by 2007.

The termbank can also cast a light on evolutions of EU culture.

French fossils

The EU's penchant for abstract policy "spaces" is a fossil of the French political term "espace" used in the 1970s and 1980s before English became the most popular language for original European Commission documents.

The phrase "absorption capacity" started out as a value in chemistry, extended to the capacity of new member states to absorb EU funds then moved to the EU's capacity to absorb refugees.

Its latest usage, as the EU’s institutional capacity to absorb new member states, is still too fresh to appear in the glossary.

Some sensitive words, such as "terrorist" and "genocide" also stand out in the EU terminologist's work.

"Terrorist" is "too sensitive" to fall under a terminologist's authority, but IATE defines it as "a person who commits a violent act for political reasons."

"Genocide" is described in line with the International Criminal Court in The Hague as harmful acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."